Amazon will pay a total of more than $30 million in separate privacy settlements with the Federal Trade Commission involving its Ring cameras and Alexa voice assistant, despite taking issue with the underlying claims.
The allegations underscore the risks that consumers take when entrusting ostensibly private content and personal data to tech companies, including the potential for rogue employees to take advantage of lax oversight.
However, Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s claims, and denied violating the law. In some cases, Amazon said it had already addressed the underlying problems prior to regulatory intervention.
The company sought to reassure customers about its controls and safeguards for video and personal data.
“While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring, and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us,” Amazon said in a statement addressing both privacy settlements.
The complaints and coinciding settlements are the FTC’s first actions against Amazon since Lina Khan took over as chair of the commission, according to Bloomberg Law. Khan rose to prominence due in part to her widely referenced article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” published by Yale Law Review.
Ring privacy case: The case against Ring, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleges that the company made false or misleading claims about its privacy and security practices, and failed to protect consumers’ video data from unauthorized access.
Amazon agreed to pay $5.8 million under the Ring settlement, which requires court approval.
The Ring complaint includes an allegation that one employee “viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to at least 81 unique female users” in otherwise private areas of their homes between June and August 2017, which coincides with the months leading up to Amazon’s 2018 acquisition of the company.
“Ring’s disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in an FTC news release. “The FTC’s order makes clear that putting profit over privacy doesn’t pay.”
Ring responded in a public post, “We want our customers to know that the FTC complaint draws on matters that Ring promptly addressed on its own, well before the FTC began its inquiry; mischaracterizes our security practices; and ignores the many protections we have in place for our customers.”
Alexa and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act: A separate complaint involving Alexa, filed in federal court in Seattle, alleges that Amazon violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act) with respect to its Alexa voice assistant service.
“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said the FTC’s Levine in a news release. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”
Amazon agreed to to pay a $25 million civil penalty, delete data for inactive Alexa child profiles, stop misrepresenting its privacy practices for geolocation and voice information, implement a comprehensive privacy program, provide notice to users, and comply with reporting and recordkeeping obligations.
“We designed Amazon Kids to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and applied rigorous standards when we expanded Amazon Kids to include Alexa,” Amazon said in a post about the Alexa settlement. “In fact, before we launched Amazon Kids on Alexa several years ago, we collaborated directly with the FTC to share our approach to COPPA compliance.”
The settlement involving Alexa also requires court approval.
